It is not possible to be any kind of writer other than yourself. Some days, it is not even possible to be the best version of yourself, or a good one. On those days, all I can do is try to be a more tasteful version. It’s like – you didn’t iron your shirt? Again? Then don’t take off your jacket.
Category Archives: writing
His wife, after all, often waited tables to support him.
…until mid-1977, Raymond Carver was out of control. While teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he and John Cheever became drinking buddies. “He and I did nothing but drink,” Carver said of the fall semester of 1973. “I don’t think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters.” Because Cheever had no car, Carver provided transportation on their twice-weekly booze runs. They liked to arrive at the liquor store just as the clerk was unlocking for the day. Cheever noted in his journal that Carver was “a very kind man.” He was also an irresponsible boozehound who habitually ran out on the check in restaurants, even though he must have known it was the waitress who had to pay the bill for such dine-and-dash customers. His wife, after all, often waited tables to support him.
It was Maryann Burk Carver who won the bread in those early years while Ray drank, fished, went to school and began writing the stories that a generation of critics and teachers would miscategorize as “minimalism” or “dirty realism.”
– Stephen King in the NYT on the new Carol Sklenicka bio of Carver (and the new Library of America Collected Stories of Carver)
in case you couldn’t tell
it is difficult to blog about the program. That’s why I haven’t been doing it. You would think that writing about writing would be a natural extension of writing. It is not. For me. Doesn’t work. One precludes the other.
So.
You would also think that I could write about the program itself, and that might be something in which people would be interested. Right? But every time I begin to do it, I feel as if putting anything up here at all violates the trust of the people I’m here with. Even the most boring activities. If I were, for example, to say “We had seminar today” (which we didn’t) I don’t at all know that my friends here would want others to know that. Writers = private people. Even I find myself becoming more introverted with each day here.
So I guess you shouldn’t expect me to say much for…what? Two years?
I could say that I like it here. Every time people ask me how the program’s going, I say, “It’s wonderful, I’m very lucky to be here.” Which is true. And when they ask how the people are, I say, “They are amazing. I love them.” Also true. When they ask me how the writing is going, I say, “I am questioning everything.” And that last, so help me, is the truest of the three.
I could also say this: I get to talk to a professor and students on Saturday about choruses, with regards to their performance of a Greek play, which should be fun. This is my third chorus outreach-related activity in four months in B-more.
I also think I might be able to make some general observations on what it is like to be a graduate student. General observations on Baltimore are going to be limited, because while school is in session, I almost never leave the Homewood campus bubble.
I’m going to try, though, because I need to keep writing here.
past participle
If you have spent time trying to establish the truth of things as they happened, to remember truthfully, it is unsettling to blithely delete a memory and rewrite it with a few keystrokes. But it is a necessity to rewrite the events of the past. It is a “Il faut que.” Must. The truth of events as they happened is, most often, too shapeless and arbitrary to be a poem. And sometimes the truth is more than can be believed. The poem cannot always sustain the shock of it.
the internet is for TMI
The Computer informs me that someone has recently searched for and found this blog by searching for “The Adventures of Sander Lamori And His Wonder Dog, Bentham,” the very briefly-lived serial story I wrote for the Stanford Daily. Uh..who was this? I am very curious, but happy to know someone besides me still thinks about the thing. It’ll come back one day. I swear. Just not right now. I have to figure out how to write imagery.
it must be some sort of diabolical mind control
On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, I had individual meetings with about two-thirds of the students in my class. I’ll meet the rest next week. We talked about their artistic tastes and their writing experiences. It took a lot of time to meet with all of them, but I hope it will be worth it in terms of establishing a good workshop relationship.
On Friday, we discussed Elizabeth Bishop’s “In The Waiting Room” and Seamus Heaney’s “Digging,” and got into a spirited discussion about enjambment.
And thus far I have obeyed the Department of Health and Safety mandate of taking at least 24 consecutive hours entirely off from all kinds of work each week: from Friday at 2 pm till Saturday at 2 pm, all I did was watch movies and hang out with friends. It was wonderful. We went to the Evergreen House, a very creepy museum and house belonging to a Baltimore railroad baron’s family, and saw screenings of the animated TELL-TALE HEART and the live-shmaction THE RAVEN projected outside, as part of a Poe exhibit. We also saw an old edition of Poe with illustrations, and one of his signed letters. The man’s handwriting had more flourishes than a fencing match.
And then I also watched TANPOPO, which I would watch again this very second. You couldn’t pay me enough to sit through THE RAVEN again, except for the magician’s duel section – which I would like to get an isolated clip of. Clearly, Dr. Scarabus’s powers extend far beyond the walls of the castle.
We were hoping someone would read Poe’s The Raven aloud, but no one did – so that situation was rectified later in the evening through recitation. I have never read so much poetry aloud as I have here, with these people. It’s great. The Raven, as a poem, is perhaps just slightly too long – but, my God, there are great lines in it.
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!
I also read Annabel Lee last night, and, as usual, it blew what remained of my mind. Did you know it was one of the last complete poems composed by Poe? I did not.
I am now sort of back on the clock, now. I have a new first draft going. It has to use imagery – we have assignments for workshop – and, as you all know, imagery is my weakness. So this was good for me to try. In writing the draft, I found some stuff I would not normally have found.
never have I ever
directed a play…
I am going through three boxes of scary files that have not been sorted. I bought something that looks like an able seaman’s chest, or some Western debutante’s Trunk, off the street where I live, and am filling it with properly alphabetized production documents. This is only reminding me of my age. I didn’t remember that I did the choreography for Don Giovanni…or AD’d a production of Frankenstein (the classical music version)…or…so many things.
I’ve been doing this for ten years, after all. Ten years. L once told me I needed to make a list of every production I’d ever done, because otherwise I would forget. I thought that was absurd. How can you forget something that takes so much work? But she was right.
Seeing these old files is like seeing a slide show of my past. Or reading a biography of someone whose work I like, but who I don’t know that well. The things I have done are now so far away that they seem detached from me. AVW and BH might as well have been directed by another person. I know I did it, but I don’t know how I did it! And I don’t know if I could do it again!
Also, I found a file of my old Stanford papers, one of which is about Bovary, and uses the word “Epist-Emma-Ology” in the title. Ha ha.
My writing, when I was in school, was insufferably arrogant. I don’t know that my writing has changed that much since then, or my ego, but I will say that reading these papers, written before I had learned how to spell “humility,” let alone possess it, makes me laugh. Some of the writing is awful. Some is okay. But all the papers, well written or not, are confident to the point of exploding.
it’s when you get the feed back
Today was the first day of department orientation for my writing program, and the first time I met the faculty and my cohort of first-year poets. It was very exciting to put names and faces to the email addresses I’ve been seeing for months.
I came home after the presentations, took an online language placement test, and fell into thinking about where my writing had started and where it is now. I read aloud my entire portfolio – the ten poems I used for grad school apps – just to hear and remember. I haven’t looked at them in months. Much of it is stuff I would change now, but there is something there I still like.
It’s nice to feel a sense of my own history with poetry, and feel that there is a trend for the better. It’s even nicer to think that I will be in an environment, for two years, where I can actively and publicly experiment with ideas that have mostly just been bouncing around my head.
There is something about hanging out with other writers all day long that makes me really language-high. The way everyone uses words seems so mellifluous, or deliberate, or dizzying. It’s not like people are dropping references all the time. It’s not like a Ginsberg poem. But it is like being in a play, a bit. To clarify, hanging with actors is like being in a play in terms of the drama; but hanging with writers is like being in a play in terms of the language.
I am at home and at something as close to complete peace as my life ever approximates.
in brevitas,
Concluded the Single Carrot Stones process on Sunday. That was great – I’ll get to go back and give them designer-run notes in a bit.
The program starts tomorrow. I have spent more time in the library than is reasonable or prudent in the last few weeks, in preparation for something for which you can’t prepare. I am going to iron some shirts, and then I’ll be as ready as I’ll ever be.
and thus leaves the women more discourageable
…while nature seems to award brilliance equally to men and women, society does not nurture it equally in the two sexes, and thus leaves the women more discourageable. Nor, in females, does the world reward selfishness, which, sad to say, artists seem to need, or so one gathers from the portraits of the men in these books. One can also gather it from biographies of the women who did not lose heart—for example, George Eliot, whose books were the product of a life custom-padded by her mate, George Lewes. (Phyllis Rose, in her “Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages,” reports that for twenty-four years Lewes screened Eliot’s incoming letters, together with all reviews of her books, and threw away anything that might distress her.) Then there is Virginia Woolf, whose novels would never have been written had she not had non-stop nursing care from Leonard Woolf. Virginia knew this, and seems to have decided she deserved it, or so she suggests in “A Room of One’s Own.” But, male or female, once the artist walks into that private room and closes the door, a lot of people are going to feel shut out—are going to be shut out—and they may suffer.
– Joan Acocella, “A Fire In The Brain,” from her 2003 New Yorker review of the Carol Loeb Shloss Lucia Joyce bio.
Dara Weinberg 